How can I see if a Perl hash already has a certain key?

Question

I believe to check if a key exists in a hash you just do

if (exists $strings{$string}) {
    ...
} else {
    ...
}

I would counsel against using if ($hash{$key}) since it will not do what you expect if the key exists but its value is zero or empty.

Well, your whole code can be limited to:

foreach $line (@lines){
        $strings{$1}++ if $line =~ m|my regex|;
}

If the value is not there, ++ operator will assume it to be 0 (and then increment to 1). If it is already there - it will simply be incremented.

I guess that this code should answer your question:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @keys = qw/one two three two/;
my %hash;
for my $key (@keys)
{
    $hash{$key}++;
}

for my $key (keys %hash)
{
   print "$key: ", $hash{$key}, "\n";
}

Output:

three: 1
one: 1
two: 2

The iteration can be simplified to:

$hash{$_}++ for (@keys);

(See $_ in perlvar.) And you can even write something like this:

$hash{$_}++ or print "Found new value: $_.\n" for (@keys);

Which reports each key the first time it’s found.